Indra Nooyi smiles through the BS

In this week’s episode of Art of Power, host Aarti Shahani sits down with Indra Nooyi, who became the first woman and immigrant to head a Fortune 50 company when she was named CEO of PepsiCo in 2006. Nooyi and host Aarti Shahani discuss her unusual family – where the men pushed her to be more ambitious. Aarti asks Nooyi how she manages to stay so light-hearted when people cut her down at work. (It’s something she does over and over again.) Her answer? It’s not what Aarti expected. Indra Nooyi’s book, My Life In Full, has a provocative passage. Describing the times she’s been invited into rooms with the most influential people on the planet, she writes: “The titans of industry, politics and economics, talked about advancing the world through finance, technology, and flying to Mars. Family – the actual messy, delightful, difficult and treasured core of how most of us live – was fringe. This disconnect has profound consequences…In a prosperous marketplace, we need all women to have the choice to work in paid jobs outside the home and for our social and economic infrastructure to entirely support that choice.” (emphasis added) Aarti dissects that call to action with her. It sounds like the call of a feminist or labor leader. Nooyi posits her argument is simple economics. “If you think like an economist, not a feminist, then you say you want the best resources available, which means that men and women, the best talent, have to be in the service of the economy,” Nooyi says. “And that requires some social support. … If you don't provide them a support structure, and then lament about the great resignation, it's crazy.”